Preventable Hospital Visits by NYC ZIP Code: Where the ER Stands In for a Doctor

Some emergency room visits are for things an ER exists for: a broken bone, chest pain, a car crash. Others are for problems that a regular doctor, seen in time, usually keeps from becoming an emergency: an asthma flare, a urinary infection, a toothache, an earache. New York State counts that second group by the patient’s ZIP code every year. The latest year is 2023. We put the 173 New York City ZIP codes in order and matched each to its neighborhood.

The map that comes out is not about anyone’s choices in the waiting room. It is a map of where getting a regular doctor is hard.

What “potentially preventable” means here

The state uses software from 3M Health Information Systems to flag potentially preventable visits: emergency visits for conditions that, in the Department of Health’s words, may result from a lack of adequate access to care or of ambulatory care coordination. The idea is that monitoring and follow-up outside the hospital could reduce them.

Three things the measure is not:

• It is not a judgment on the patient. Going to the ER for a condition that a clinic could have handled is often the only option open on a Saturday night, without insurance, or without a doctor who answers the phone.
• It is not a count of people. The rate is visits divided by residents, times 100. One person with five visits counts five times.
• It is not medical advice. It describes a population. Whether you need an emergency room is a different question, and in an emergency the answer is to go. When the ER is the right place.

The state publishes three rates for each ZIP. The observed rate is what happened. The expected rate is what the state would predict from the age, sex and race or ethnicity of the people who live there. The risk-adjusted rate scales observed against expected so areas can be compared on a level field.

The ZIP codes with the most preventable visits

The top of the list is a short stretch of the South and Central Bronx and upper Manhattan. Nine Bronx ZIP codes and five in Harlem and East Harlem have rates above 34 per 100 residents, more than twice the state’s 16.48. The highest in Brooklyn is Ocean Hill-Brownsville, 11212, at 37.93. Queens’ highest is Edgemere and Far Rockaway, 11691, at 28.87; Staten Island’s is St. George and Silver Lake, 10301, at 24.35.

The gaps are not explained by who lives there. In 10457 the state expected 23.62 visits per 100 residents from its population’s age, sex and race or ethnicity; the observed rate was 23.40 higher than that, the largest excess in the city. East Harlem’s 10035, at 19.70 above expected, and Concourse’s 10451, at 19.66, come next.

The reverse also appears. In southeast Queens, Rosedale (11422), Cambria Heights (11411) and Laurelton (11413) are near the city median on observed visits, but the state expected far more: around 30 per 100 residents. Their observed rates sit about 12 below that.

By borough

County rates from the state’s county dataset. ZIP counts exclude three ZIP codes that straddle the Nassau County line; see the methodology.

The Bronx rate is nearly double the state’s, and adjusting for population does not close the gap. Manhattan’s average hides the widest spread of any borough: from 43.31 in Central Harlem’s 10037 to 4.41 in Battery Park City. Brooklyn and Queens come out below the state once population is taken into account.

Rates dipped everywhere in 2020, when people stayed away from emergency rooms, and have climbed back since. The Bronx went from 32.58 in 2019 to 23.32 in 2020 and 31.45 in 2023.

ZIP codes in neighborhoods we cover

Where a ZIP code clearly sits in one of our neighborhood guides, here is the rate and the guide.

Neighborhood names follow the NYC Health Department’s ZIP code labels. Rank 1 is the highest rate.

All 173 ZIP codes

What it means for you

The fix the numbers point to is a regular source of care before something becomes urgent. New York City has several, and none requires insurance or papers.

Methodology

Data. NYS Department of Health, Hospital Emergency Department Discharges (SPARCS De-Identified): Potentially Preventable Emergency Visit (PPV) Rates by Patient Zip Code: Beginning 2011, downloaded through the state’s open data API on October 16, 2026. The latest year is 2023, computed with 3M PPV software version 2.2, the version used since 2017. Borough figures come from the county version of the same dataset. The state calculates the rates from SPARCS inpatient and outpatient records and Claritas population estimates.

Unit. All PPV figures are visits per 100 residents in a year, as the data dictionary defines them: preventable visits by residents of the ZIP code divided by its population, multiplied by 100. The expected rate adjusts for age, gender and race or ethnicity. The risk-adjusted rate is observed divided by expected, multiplied by the statewide rate. “Observed minus expected” is the state’s “difference in rates”.

Which ZIP codes. We kept every ZIP code in the NYC Health Department’s ZIP code tabulation crosswalk that appears in the 2023 data, then removed 11001, 11003 and 11040, which straddle the Nassau County line and whose residents live mostly outside the city. That leaves 173. Neighborhood names are the Health Department’s labels, shortened in the chart. Links to our guides are added only where the label names the neighborhood.

Cross-check. For the same ZIP codes, we compared the adult Prevention Quality Indicator overall composite for 2023, which counts potentially preventable hospital admissions of adults per 100,000 people, from the state’s PQI dataset. The correlation between the two rates is 0.8, and 14 of the 20 highest ZIP codes on one measure are among the 20 highest on the other.

Limits. A ZIP code’s rate describes its residents, not the hospitals they used. Small ZIP codes, such as Breezy Point, have small populations and can move a lot from year to year. 2023 is the most recent year the state has published.

Download the data: nyc-preventable-visits-by-zip.csv, 173 rows, one per ZIP code, and the borough series for 2019 to 2023. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Please credit: NYC Med News, “Preventable Hospital Visits by NYC ZIP Code,” October 16, 2026, from NYS DOH SPARCS data.